Goodness. What a delicious issue that  issue that reveals the very problematic assumptions that we make about mind, psychopathology and the nature-nurture question.

I have not read this book — The Psychopath Inside. I have reproduced the description of the book below, if desired. 

So, the author had a psychopathic brain?  Was there a psychopath inside?  The answer to both questions, I think, is no.

The author could not have had a psychopathic brain, because (at least from the narrative below), he was not a psychopath!  What defines psychopathy? Certainly not the brain!  Psychopathy is a term we use to refer to a syndrome of psychological activity.  It is a psychological concept, not a biological one.  And so, its “reality” is to be found in psychological processes — not the brain. 

You can identify if someone has diabetes by looking at their blood sugar levels, etc.  It doesn’t matter what the person feels and does.  But you can’t identify a “psychopath” by looking at his brain. It is entirely a function of what he feels and what he does.  In fact — the capacity to identify a brain as typical of psychopathy relies on the psychological concept — not the brain!

And so, did the author have a psychopathic brain?  Well, no.  He may have had a brain that is typical of many people we call psychopaths — but there is no “psychopathic brain”. 

We are notoriously bad at keeping the psychological distinct from the biological.  To be sure, all psychological processes are forms of biological processes; but the former cannot be reduced to the latter.  


M.



===

“The last scan in the pile was strikingly odd. In fact it looked exactly like the most abnormal of the scans I had just been writing about, suggesting that the poor individual it belonged to was a psychopath—or at least shared an uncomfortable amount of traits with one....When I found out who the scan belonged to, I had to believe there was a mistake....But there had been no mistake. The scan was mine.”

For the first fifty-eight years of his life James Fallon was by all appearances a normal guy. A successful neuroscientist and medical school professor, he’d been raised in a loving, supportive family, married his high school sweetheart, and had three kids and lots of friends.


Then he learned a shocking truth that would not only disrupt his personal and professional life, but would lead him to question the very nature of his own identity.


The Psychopath Inside tells the fascinating story of Fallon’s reaction to the discovery that he has the brain of a psychopath. While researching serial murderers, he uncovered a distinct neurological pattern in their brain scans that helped explain their cold and violent behavior. A few months later he learned that he was descended from a family with a long line of murderers which confirmed that Fallon’s own brain pattern wasn’t a fluke.


As a scientist convinced that humans are shaped by their genetics, Fallon set out to reconcile the truth about his brain with everything he knew about the mind, behavior, and the influence of nature vs. nurture on our personalities. How could he, a successful scientist and a happy family man with no history of violence, be a psychopath? How much did his biology influence his behavior? Was he capable of some of the gruesome atrocities perpetrated by the serial killers he had studied?








Michael F. Mascolo, Ph.D.
Academic Director, Compass Program
Professor, Department of Psychology
Merrimack College, North Andover, MA 01845
978.837.3503 (office)
978.979.8745 (cell)

Political Conversations Study: www.CreatingCommonGround.org
Coaching and Author Website: www.michaelmascolo.com

"Things move, persons act." -- Kenneth Burke
"If it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well." -- Donald Hebb

On May 13, 2020, at 9:03 AM, Diop, Corinne Joan Martin - diopcj <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

I ran across this and found it interesting-- a neuroscientist who was studying brain abnormalities associated with psychopathy tested himself and discovered his brain had them: The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain / https://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Inside-Neuroscientists-Personal/dp/1591846005

Corinne

________________________________________
From: tree of knowledge system discussion [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2020 5:09 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Freudian filter

Jamie,
 That is not exactly how I would conceptualize psychopaths. What you describe here is closer to anti-social personality tendencies, which is a different cluster of concerns (anti-social overlaps, but also is quite different in that there are many anti-social folks who are not psychopaths and a number of psychopaths who are not anti-social, at least in terms of actions).

In brief, psychopaths lack empathy/sympathy for the emotional pain of others. In the language of the Influence Matrix, they lack or are extremely limited in the affective cluster around affiliation. Affiliation means to bring in as one or be a part of. Our affiliative system is what allows us to mesh with the interests of others and bring them in as our own. And this is what is fundamentally different about the psychopath. The simply don’t care that someone else would be hurt or injured. And it is not so much at the cognitive level of not caring. That is, it isn’t a justification, whereby they learn that certain other people are not important and not warrant care (we are all capable of learning that there are “others” who we should not affiliate with).

Rather, this is a basic perceptual-motivational-affective tendency to be extremely limited in their core affiliative capacities. It is likely to emerge as a function of a genetic predisposition followed by serious attachment injuries during sensitive developmental periods. This is especially true of sadistic psychopaths, who do enjoy the power that their capacity to inflict pain over others brings them.

Best,
Gregg

From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Jamie D
Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2020 10:50 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Freudian filter


I’m convinced people can become psychopaths, which I see as simply losing interest or faith in the simple, obvious, pragmatic good, after making seemingly innocuous choices, like being lazy, until their mind loses contact with value from lack of investment in value.
And because everything is exponential, they drift towards entropic, less useful, less meaningful pleasures until their hearts and vision are so small, they delight in totally useless behaviors like those we call “psychopathic”.


On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 2:46 PM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
I think that would be extreme 😊. Consider, for example, there are sadistic psychopaths…

But we can say that the Freudian filter is deeply tied to self-deception, and that is one of the core features that allows human to “do evil” (to borrow a phrase from TOKer Steve Quackenbush).

From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> On Behalf Of Jamie D
Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2020 4:30 PM
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Freudian filter

Would it be extreme to say the Freudian filter is the root of all evil? Or, that lying to oneself is the first step down a slippery slope towards unconsciousness?


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-Jamie
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